My Heart Just Dropped

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Marvel and some television.

SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY (2026)

Spider-Man and The Punisher were two of my favorite Marvel Comics characters when I was a kid, and there was a time when the idea of those characters sharing the screen in a movie seemed like such an impossible dream, I thought the closest we could ever get would maybe be a movie where Jackie Chan would share the screen with Sylvester Stallone in Rambo mode, or something like that. While reading through Marvel comic books, I would stop and look at ads showing the cover for the video game The Punisher: The Ultimate Payback, which features a cameo appearance by Spider-Man, and ponder, “What if?” What if there was a movie that had both Spider-Man and The Punisher in it?

Well, now that movie exists. Spider-Man: Brand New Day features The Punisher (played by Jon Bernthal, who started playing the character in Netflix shows) in a supporting role, and the action was brought to the screen with the help of Jackie Chan's stunt team. Chan isn’t in the movie, but he did visit the set. (Sylvester Stallone, on the other hand, didn’t come anywhere near the set.)

Tom Holland reprises the role of Peter Parker / Spider-Man in this Marvel Cinematic Universe entry, which picks up four years after Doctor Strange's spell at the end of Spider-Man: No Way Home erased Peter Parker from everyone's memory – protecting not only his privacy, but also his best friend Ned Leeds (Jacob Batalon) and girlfriend Michelle "MJ" Jones-Watson (Zendaya). Peter has been keeping his distance from his loved ones all this time, focusing entirely on his Spider-Man crimefighting career – and that allows for a montage sequence that I’ve been hoping to see ever since Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 was released back in 2004. Spider-Man has a very large rogues gallery in the comics, but only a select few of his villains could hold up as the main villain in a movie. A lot of them either need to be side characters / henchmen... or, and this is the realization I was hoping Raimi would have when making Spider-Man 2 (and that every filmmaker working on a Spider-Man movie would have since) – you could burn through several of them during a crimefighting montage. Just drop them in there to give the fans a smile. With Brand New Day, director Destin Daniel Cretton gives us a quick montage where Spider-Man is seen encountering the likes of Tombstone, Boomerang, Ramrod, and Tarantula.

Finally tying off a thread that has been dangling since Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017, Brand New Day also sees Spidey facing off with the villain Scorpion, played by Michael Mando. But Scorpion isn’t the main villain in this film – and it’s a good thing we have so many traditional Spider-Man villains seen along the way, because the main threats and villains in Brand New Day are not Spider-Man characters.

The story gets rolling when a telepath who can project their consciousness into other bodies begins attacking Department of Damage Control facilities in search of something called "V-Max." Eventually, this telepath is revealed to be Jean Grey (played by Sadie Sink), whose sister Sara was kidnapped and killed by the DODC, leading Jean to lash out at the agency and its director, Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman). So while Jean Grey causes most of the trouble in the film, she’s actually on the good side (of course, since she goes on to be a major part of the X-Men team of mutant heroes) and Metzger is the true villain, even though he’s a character who only appeared in one X-Men miniseries back in 1999. As his security team, Metzger has rehabilitated members of the villainous ninja group The Hand, a group that was created in the pages of the Daredevil comic book (which is why they were previously a threat on the Daredevil Netflix series). If we didn’t have Scorpion and those lower-tier Spider-Man villains, I would be disappointed that a Spider-Man movie had X-Men and Daredevil characters as the antagonists.

Cretton and writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers (with an uncredited Justin Kuritzkes) did a great job telling this story, though, so I was intrigued and invested every step of the way instead of ever thinking of being disappointed. Not even when the climax had me thinking that some of this was sort of a repeat of Thunderbolts*. Of course, it’s a definite bonus that we also get to see Spider-Man interact with The Punisher in this movie – and he’s not the only fellow Marvel hero who’s present. Spidey also does some interacting with New Avengers member Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), and when he starts to develop new and increasingly uncontrollable spider abilities, he seeks help from scientist Bruce Banner (Marc Ruffalo). But checking in with Banner turns out to have been a bad idea when Jean Grey gets into the guy’s head and unleashes The Hulk.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a really fun movie, and it might even manage to be the best movie so far in the Tom Holland Spider-Man series... although Tobey Maguire’s role in No Way Home causes that movie to be serious competition. It’s good, it’s emotional, it has some really cool moments – and I have to mention that my enjoyment was enhanced by the fact that I saw the movie while sitting in a D-Box seat that shook the hell out of me during every action scene.

BEEF SEASON TWO (2026)

Created by Lee Sung Jin for the Netflix streaming service, Beef began with something as stupid as a road rage incident and turned it into a darkly funny psychological thriller about two deeply unhappy people destroying their lives one bad decision at a time. The series became a major success, earning Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe wins, and while the original ten-episode run was intended to be a limited series, its success convinced Netflix and Lee Sung Jin to continue the show as an anthology. That means Beef season 2 leaves the season 1 characters behind and introduces an entirely new collection of unhappy people whose lives are about to spiral out of control.

Season 2 of Beef introduces us to Josh Martín (Oscar Isaac), a country club general manager who is drowning in debt and enduring a failing marriage to Lindsay (Carey Mulligan). Young club employee Ashley (Cailee Spaeny) and her personal trainer Austin fiancé (Charles Melton) – one of the most amusingly worthless characters you could hope to see – are struggling with their own relationship and financial problems. After Ashley and Austin witness what appears to be Josh violently attacking Lindsay, they use a video of the incident to blackmail the couple, but their attempt to improve their situation turns into a much bigger mess. Ashley discovers that her employer-provided health insurance won't adequately cover treatment for her ovarian condition, while Josh is using fraudulent invoices and an account belonging to his recently deceased mother to conceal his debts, potentially setting Ashley up as the fall guy. Meanwhile, the club's new billionaire owner, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), arrives with plans to transform the business, but she has her own enormous problems: her plastic surgeon husband (Song Kang-ho) has accidentally killed a patient, and Park becomes involved in the medical cover-up.

As the various schemes develop, everybody begins lying to everybody else. Ashley and Austin's engagement deteriorates when Austin develops a relationship with Park's assistant, Eunice (Seoyeon Jang), while Lindsay grows increasingly suspicious of Josh and eventually decides their marriage is beyond repair. Just like in the first season, the situations spiral further and further out of control as the episodes go on. In this case, things go so haywire that we eventually get characters being chased around by armed gunmen in Seoul.

Apparently Netflix subscribers weren’t interested in following a new group of characters through a beef-filled story, because viewership on the second season was reportedly down 58% from the first. That’s unfortunate, because I found that Beef season 2, while different from its predecessor, still managed to tell an interesting, funny, entertaining story. The characters are all deeply flawed, but the actors and writers managed to make them intriguing to watch as things fall apart around them.

I would be glad to see Beef continue as an anthology series, but a third season doesn’t appear to be very likely at this point.

I WILL FIND YOU (2026)

Author Harlan Coben has been writing mystery thriller books for thirty years, and recently TV adaptations of those works have been big business. Streaming services are packed with Coben shows these days – and in the case of the miniseries I Will Find You, we have a show that Coben pitched to the Netflix streaming service before he was even finished writing the book, he was so confident that it would make for an interesting series. And he was right.

I Will Find You begins with Boston law professor David Burroughs (Sam Worthington) being convicted of brutally murdering his three-year-old son, Matthew. Although the child's body could not be visually identified, DNA evidence supposedly confirmed that it was Matthew, sending David to prison while he insists that he is innocent. Five years into his sentence, David's former sister-in-law Rachel Mills (Britt Lower) brings him a photograph from an amusement park that appears to show an older Matthew, complete with the distinctive birthmark that would identify him. With the possibility that his son is still alive, David escapes prison and goes searching for his child.

Coben and showrunner Robert Hull throw plenty of twists and turns into the story, as David is aided along the way not just by Rachel but also by her ex-boyfriend Hayden Payne (Milo Ventimiglia), his best friend Adam Mackenzie (Jonathan Tucker), the warden of the prison (Peter Outerbridge), and his former detective father (Hugh Thompson). With FBI agents (Logan Browning and Chi McBride) on his trail and mobsters in the mix (Clancy Brown alert!), David learns that there are plenty of suspects in this situation – even including a hospital administrator (Aaron Ashmore) who’s now married to David’s ex-wife Cheryl (Erin Richards), the mother of Matthew.

This is a very well-crafted and engaging mystery, so well put together that my girlfriend, who usually solves film and TV mysteries within minutes, didn’t see the answer coming in this one. It’s no wonder Coben is so popular; he comes up with some really interesting mysteries.